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Tag Archives: tech-culture
When IP Escapes – the Sad Case of the Hoverboard
A few weeks ago my son was bothering me incessantly about hoverboards. People in his class were talking about them, so he just had to get one. The Amazon reviews were equally split between 5-star “This is the coolest toy … Continue reading
Microsoft Buys the Brains of Boys Everywhere
So Microsoft just bought Mojang, the studio that produces Minecraft, for $2.5B. That sounds like a ridiculous amount for a video game, particularly one that looks so crude, unless you happen to know some boys. For my 10-year-old son and … Continue reading
Paying for Bad News: Funding the Keeling Curve
Here’s one of the most frightening charts in all of science: CO2 has risen by a quarter just in my lifetime, and we all know the consequences. The chart comes from a remarkably sustained effort by Charles David Keeling: and … Continue reading
Solectria – Achieving Goals By Lowering Them
A few days ago some good news finally came to a guy who has been trying to save the world for a very long time. James Worden is the founder of the Massachusetts company Solectria Renewables, and it just got … Continue reading
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Tagged electric-cars, energy-ish, mit-ish, solar inverters, Tech life in New England, tech-culture
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The Glass Empire Strikes Back
Google Glass has gotten enormous grief in the last few months. Places are banning it, and people have gotten into fights over it. Even the tech journalist David Pogue finds it creepy: You no longer know if you’re being filmed … Continue reading
The Lost Engineering Paradise of DEC
I was saddened to hear the recent news that Intel is closing its Hudson MA semiconductor fab. It’s 35 years old, and couldn’t be upgraded to the latest process nodes. It’s still using 200 mm diameter wafers and a 130 … Continue reading
The Inspiring “Pale Blue Dot” and the Clunky New Horizons
I recently came across a striking animation of Carl Sagan’s famous passage from his last book “Pale Blue Dot”: Pale Blue Dot from ORDER on Vimeo. He’s commenting on this picture, taken at his request by Voyager 1 in 1990 … Continue reading
Lynn Conway, EE and Sexual Pioneer
The latest issue of IEEE Solid State Circuits magazine has a good piece by Lynn Conway about how she changed VLSI design. In a quite direct way she changed my career too. In 1979 I was just starting grad school, … Continue reading
“MIT Rising”, But Not Because of Startups
The November issue of Boston magazine has an article “How MIT Became the Most Important University in the World” by Chris Vogel. It talks about how MIT students are better dressed these days, more articulate, and more out-going. In fact, … Continue reading
“Chasing Ice” – Big Science Adventure
You’ve probably heard that climate change is melting the Arctic, but it’s another thing to see it happening in front of you: Or to see what it does to an icescape: That’s why James Balog, a well-known nature photographer, founded … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 